$2.5 million grant focuses on how vector-borne diseases become epidemics

Two Kansas State University researchers are among an international team that will use a $2.5 million grant to explore how vector-borne diseases spread across great distances and to learn how to better control epidemics, according to a press release.

“We at K-State want to collaborate with this team to seek the universal knowledge in transmission of infectious diseases despite the apparently disparate models describing distinct domains,” Faryad Darabi Sahneh, PhD, research assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Kansas State University, said in the release.

The researchers will model epidemics by studying the long-distance spread of vector-borne diseases and evaluating different control methods such as limiting animal movements or reducing the vector population, the release said.

“The role of long-range dispersal is important to examine because sometimes the diseases don’t spread as a wave in a population, but they jump to far locations because an infected animal is transferred to a distant farm or an exposed person travels from one city to another, maybe on a different continent,” Caterina Scoglio, PhD, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Kansas State, said in the release.

The NIH, National Science Foundation, the Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, and the United Kingdom’s Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council awarded the grant through the Ecology and Evolution of Infectious Diseases program. The program supports projects that study how large-scale environmental events change the risk for infectious disease emergence, according to the release.

The project combines scientists with expertise in plant pathology, livestock disease and vector-borne disease. The team also includes researchers from Oregon State University, North Carolina State University, the USDA and two universities in England.